Life in Bosnia: A Sarajevo Businessman

Life in Bosnia: A Sarajevo Businessman

This article was submitted by an American teacher teaching English in Sarajevo.
I first met my student on a Monday evening. He was wearing a suit and tie, and his level was pre-intermediate. He had relatives in the US and had been to a language school there during a month-long trip. I admired this willingness for a relatively older learner with a high-status job to enroll in an elementary level language class.

One of the first things I learned about him was that he didn’t want to write. Anything, ever. He wanted to speak. This provided quite the challenge at his level and sometimes our lessons seemed to drag because I did not find enough interesting speaking activities to fill three hours a week. I finally spoke to my director. Was he not satisfied? Was he not learning? He was perfectly satisfied, she said, and she knew this because he would definitely complain if he wasn’t. But if I wanted to teach him just once a week, she offered to have someone else take the other day. This sounded like the perfect compromise, but after one lesson with the other teacher, my student’s secretary called. There was no problem with the other teacher, but he had started with Katie and wanted to continue with Katie. Duly flattered, I agreed to teach him both days. I was still concerned about finding enough interesting and useful material to fill the time, but this was probably one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever received. Eventually, and fortunately, we reached quite an easy conversation point.

We’d both studied sociology and seemed to think in a similar way. I figured out how to adapt other materials so he could speak instead of listening or writing. As I became more familiar with his English, I could make lessons challenging but not too difficult. We once spoke for half an hour about volcanoes and tornadoes, and why people in Kansas don’t just build their houses with something more stable such as brick. He told me all about Bosnian food, and about a business trip to Paris he made during the war for which he couldn’t be reimbursed. His journey had included a trip through the Sarajevo tunnel and a ride in a jeep through part of Bosnia, and of course, he could not provide tickets for these trips. The organization that sponsored the trip could not reimburse him without tickets for each leg of the journey.

After a year in Sarajevo, I left for another city but returned the next year. He stopped his English studies while I was away – but came back as a student when I came back as a teacher, this time requesting three classes a week. We compromised with two. Some long-term one-to-one students come to seem like friends, even though they are paying for lessons. Often they are people who I just wouldn’t encounter or strike up friendships with otherwise. We spent three hours a week talking, though, more time than I spend talking with my family and most friends. I felt at a bit of loss that I probably wouldn’t have any contact with him after I left. He did, however, leave me with a thoughtful gift by which I can remember him: hardcover English copies of Bridge on the Drina (Ivo Andric) and The Fortress (Mesa Selimovic). He signed each book with the inscription “Respectfully.”